Now Ivanka Trump Says It's 'Unrealistic' to Expect Her to Influence Her Father

Ivanka Trump doesn't think the world should expect her to be able to influence her father on policy decisions—despite what she's said about wanting to be a moderating force in the White House.

In an interview published Thursday by the Financial Times, Trump said that it is "unrealistic" for people to think she could convince her father to change his mind on issues like climate change, DACA, or immigration. "Some people have created unrealistic expectations of what they expect from me,” she said. “That my presence in and of itself would carry so much weight with my father that he would abandon his core values and the agenda that the American people voted for when they elected him. It’s not going to happen."

"To those critics," she continued, "shy of turning my father into a liberal, I’d be a failure to them."

Despite Trump's comments, Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, have said since the campaign that they wanted to temper some of her father's more extreme positions. She told The New York Times in May of this year that she hoped to use her access as a senior adviser to advance her pet causes, but as President Trump's decision to abandon a White House initiative to close the gender pay gap proves, she's not doing much on those either. Trump said during the campaign and the transition that she would prioritize programs to help women's equality, including a paid parental leave policy that has yet to gain any real traction.

After virtually every controversial decision announced by President Trump, news stories have popped up—citing unnamed White House sources—that Ivanka and Kushner argued against making a change. This happened after Trump decided to pull the United States out of the Paris Climate Accord, after he announced that he would end DACA (which could upend the lives of some 800,000 young people currently living in the U.S.), and after he tweeted that transgender soldiers would no longer be allowed to serve in the military.

Unfortunately, Ivanka Trump didn't use her interview with the Financial Times to explain why she seems to be giving up on even pretending to influence her father.